Gardendale has swiftly emerged as ground zero for aggressive immigration enforcement in Alabama, according to local advocacy groups.

Police officers, through the city's municipal court, have since June reportedly detained numerous Latinos and turned them over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a practice that was largely unheard of until recently of and that remains rare but increasingly common across the nation, advocates say.

On Friday morning, representatives of two Birmingham-area immigrant rights groups staged a protest outside Gardendale Municipal Court aimed at raising awareness of the immigration enforcement tactics that have been deployed there, which they describe as egregious and discriminatory.

The action featured speeches by representatives of the Adelante Alabama Worker Center and the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice, as well as impassioned pleas for justice from area residents who have been impacted by the tactics.

"We want the police here in Gardendale to stop working with ICE," local Latino resident Flores Vega said through a translator. "I'm a worried mother. My son came to court here - he's a U.S. citizen - and they turned him right over to ICE ... We feel scared, we feel attacked and we want this to stop now."

Thomas Byrd, a spokesman for ICE's field office in New Orleans, which oversees immigration enforcement for multiple states in the Southeast including Alabama, emailed a statement in response to the protest.

"ICE fully respects the rights of all people to voice their opinion without interference," the statement said.

"ICE deportation officers conduct enforcement actions every day in locations around the country as part of the agency's mission to protect public safety, border security, and the integrity of the nation's immigration system. The determinations about where and how ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) personnel carry out arrests are made on a case-by-case basis, taking into account all aspects of the situation."

Jessica Vosburgh, who is Adelante's director and serving as an attorney for the two groups on this issue, also physically filed an official request under Alabama's open records law at the court Friday morning. The advocates - of which a similar one was filed with the federal government - seek documentation and "information about the nature of Gardendale's collusion with ICE," according to the request.

"We want to shed light on what Gardendale is doing," Vosburgh told the protest participants. "And we want to know: what is the relationship between Gardendale and immigration enforcement? From the testimony [of the attendees present] today, it's clear there's collusion between Gardendale and ICE."

Vosburgh said that the groups have heard from residents who say that the Gardendale court groups people with "Latino-sounding" names together on its dockets and turns those names over to ICE. She also said she has received reports that Latinos are being detained, questioned and held by ICE inside the court building. The outcry over the city's immigration enforcement approach comes as Gardendale is already under intense local and national scrutiny for its controversial decision to create a new school district, which has been widely criticized as racially discriminatory and segregationist. Gardendale officials have denied that the move is racially motivated. The Gardendale Police Department and municipal court did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday afternoon.

"This is part of a larger program of ethnic purging going on in this city," Vosburgh said. "Black people and Latino people are not treated the same as other people in this city."

An area Latino resident named Maria said that she was detained in the city's municipal court building earlier this summer.

"I came to court to pay a ticket for driving without a license. The judge sentenced me to 24 hours in jail, and when I got there ICE was waiting for me," she said Friday through a translator. "I want them to stop this practice."

No one was arrested during the protest, but Lt. Bryan Lynch of the Gardendale Police Department did direct protesters to leave the entranceway of the court, which they did while Vosburgh finished submitting the records request. He also confronted a protester who was loudly chanting and banging a drum in front of the court.

"That's disorderly conduct. You can't be banging a drum," he told the protester, who peacefully stopped the high-volume activity. "You're supposed to have a permit and we're not going to push that."

Vosburgh stated later that the groups have a right to assemble and that they did not need a permit, though they may get one if their records request goes ignored, at which point she said they would likely protest outside the court building again.

"Hopefully they're going to get us the things we're asking for, but if they don't, we'll be back," Natividad Gonzalez, a coordinator with the ACIJ, said.